Lucius Shepard published his first story of the immobilized,
mountainous dragon named Griaule in 1984, and each of the four stories
since "The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule" has furthered the purpose
of showing up the evasive, escapist stupidities at the heart of the
phrase once upon a time.

Or maybe that wasn't their purpose, in Shepard's mind. It doesn't
matter. Purpose or not, it is their effect, and it is an effect that
grows out of the stories' distant relation to fairy tales of dragons and
maidens and gallant knights and, as a Shepard character might say, all
that horseshit.

Thanks to Subterranean Press, we now have the five Dragon Griaule
stories (novellas, mostly) together between two covers instead of
scattered through various anthologies and magazines, along with a new
novella, "The Skull." For the first time, it's easy to read them one
after the other. We can spy on their correlations, theorize their
conjunctions, and spelunk through the shadows linking their darkest
caverns. On their own, the stories are moments of myth, shards of a
fantasy land that, it turns out, is just around the corner from our own.
Together with the added narrative iterations of "The Skull," the
stories show themselves to be a tapestry of texts, histories, myths,
horrors, deceits, contrivances, lies, illusions, and, in the end, hopes.